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The White House has recently announced a $1 billion cyber security grant program that is designed to help state and local governments improve their cyber defenses, especially about protecting critical infrastructure. The  recent executive order  stems from the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that was signed almost a year ago. That bill allocated $1 billion for  protecting critical infrastructure against cyber-attack  in the wake of a series of high-profile ransomware attacks such as the one that brought down the Colonial Pipeline.  Those government agencies who wish to take advantage of these funding opportunities must submit a grant proposal by mid-November. Proposals are only being accepted for the sixty days following the program's announcement. Grant recipients can use the funding to invest in new cybersecurity initiatives or to make improvements to existing defenses. Awardees are guaranteed to receive a minimum of $2 million. However, the program's req...

Cyber criminals are using a previously undocumented phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit called  Caffeine  to effectively scale up their attacks and distribute nefarious payloads. "This platform has an intuitive interface and comes at a relatively low cost while providing a multitude of features and tools to its criminal clients to orchestrate and automate core elements of their phishing campaigns," Mandiant  said  in a new report. Some of the core features offered by the platform comprise the ability to craft customized phishing kits, manage redirect pages, dynamically generate URLs that host the payloads, and track the success of the campaigns. The development comes a little over a month after Resecurity took the wraps off another PhaaS service dubbed  EvilProxy  that's offered for sale on dark web criminal forums. But unlike EvilProxy, whose operators are known to vet prospective customers before activating the subscriptions, Caffeine is notable f...

Fortinet on Monday revealed that the newly patched critical security vulnerability impacting its firewall and proxy products is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-40684  (CVSS score: 9.6), the flaw relates to an authentication bypass in FortiOS, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitchManager that could allow a remote attacker to perform unauthorized operations on the administrative interface via specially crafted HTTP(S) requests. "Fortinet is aware of an instance where this vulnerability was exploited, and recommends immediately validating your systems against the following indicator of compromise in the device's logs: user='Local_Process_Access,'" the company  noted  in an advisory. The list of impacted devices is below - FortiOS version 7.2.0 through 7.2.1 FortiOS version 7.0.0 through 7.0.6 FortiProxy version 7.2.0 FortiProxy version 7.0.0 through 7.0.6 FortiSwitchManager version 7.2.0, and FortiSwitchManager version 7.0.0 Updates hav...

A new piece of research has detailed the increasingly sophisticated nature of the malware toolset employed by an advanced persistent threat (APT) group named Earth Aughisky . "Over the last decade, the group has continued to make adjustments in the tools and malware deployments on specific targets located in Taiwan and, more recently, Japan," Trend Micro  disclosed  in a technical profile last week. Earth Aughisky, also known as  Taidoor , is a cyber espionage group that's known for its ability to abuse legitimate accounts, software, applications, and other weaknesses in the network design and infrastructure for its own ends. While the Chinese threat actor has been known to primarily target organizations in Taiwan, victimology patterns observed towards late 2017 indicate an expansion to Japan. The most commonly targeted industry verticals include government, telcom, manufacturing, heavy, technology, transportation, and healthcare. Attack chains mounted by the group...

Threat actors associated with the notorious Emotet malware are continually shifting their tactics and command-and-control (C2) infrastructure to escape detection, according to new research from VMware. Emotet  is the work of a threat actor tracked as Mummy Spider (aka TA542), emerging in June 2014 as a banking trojan before morphing into an all-purpose loader in 2016 that's capable of delivering second-stage payloads such as ransomware. While the botnet's infrastructure was  taken down  as part of a coordinated law enforcement operation in January 2021, Emotet bounced back in November 2021 through another malware known as  TrickBot . Emotet's resurrection, orchestrated by the now-defunct Conti team, has since paved the way for Cobalt Strike infections and, more recently, ransomware attacks involving  Quantum and BlackCat . "The ongoing adaptation of Emotet's execution chain is one reason the malware has been successful for so long," researchers from VMwa...

Chipmaker Intel has confirmed that proprietary source code related to its Alder Lake CPUs has been leaked, following its release by an unknown third-party on 4chan and GitHub last week. The published content contains Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) code for  Alder Lake , the company's 12th generation processors that was originally launched in November 2021. In a statement shared with Tom's Hardware, Intel  said  the leak doesn't expose "any new security vulnerabilities as we do not rely on obfuscation of information as a security measure." It's also encouraging the broader security research community to report any potential issues through its  bug bounty program , adding it's reaching out to customers to notify them of the matter. Besides the UEFI code, the leaked data dump includes a plethora of files and tools, some of which appear to come from firmware vendor Insyde Software. Exact details surrounding the nature of the hack, inclu...